The band had to ﬁnd themselves again to make their 1992 classic Kiko

While most people still associate Los Lobos with La Bamba — the Ritchie Valens cover that took them to the top of the charts in 1987 — the East L.A. trailblazers’ most impactful statement will likely always remain Kiko. The 1992 album — which received the anniversary treatment via Shout! Factory, complete with a long-overdue live DVD/documentary — sounds as fresh and vibrant as it did 20 years ago.

It’s a combination of magical songwriting and genre-mashing experimentation that even has saxophone/keyboard player and producer Steve Berlin admitting he can’t explain exactly why Kiko still holds up the way it does.

“On Kiko, we hit something,” Berlin says. “With all due modesty, it sounds kind of timeless. It sounds current, like it could’ve been done yesterday. I take some pride in that. That’s not easy to do.”

If Berlin can’t exactly put his finger on what made Kiko such a classic — was it Dave Hidalgo, Louie Perez and Cesar Rosas’ writing? Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake’s production? The spellbinding mashing of blues, Chicano rock, cabaret jazz and Latin influences? — he recalls quite vividly where the impetus to make the album came from.

After hitting the big time with La Bamba, Los Lobos released a series of successful albums that culminated with 1990’s The Neighborhood, a record that took a year to complete and sent “The Wolves” on an oversized world tour with considerable expenses like tour buses and a custom-made lighting rig.

“In retrospect, it was stuff we didn’t need at all,” Berlin says. “We came home and we were broke. We were kind of pissed off because we felt we had been sold a bill of goods by the rock myths — ‘Here’s how you do it, kid.’ We had listened to people who didn’t know us. We were poorly advised at that point, but we bought it anyway.

“So, when it came time to do Kiko, we felt like we had been misled by ourselves more than anybody else. For the first time we had stopped listening to our own instincts, and it had gone horribly off the rails. When we started making the demos for the record, we just thought, ‘Let’s do it our way. Let’s just do what we wanna do and not second-guess ourselves.’ That was the underpinning for what became the demos of Kiko.”

Although the band was disillusioned, Kiko doesn’t sound like an angry record. Rather, it is wildly adventurous. You hear it in the opening shuffle of Dream In Blue, which is coloured with surreal, atmospheric guitar textures, handclaps and vivid horn splashes. Kiko’s genius resonates in the slow, exotic jazz of Kiko and the Lavender Moon, the jangly alt-country of Whiskey Trail, and the festival/circus atmosphere of Rio De Tenampa, which closes the record.

Let’s do it our way. Let’s just do what we wanna do and not second-guess ourselves

“It’s really hard to recall making a lot of it because it seemed very dreamlike,” Berlin says. “I remember the initial part because this friend of mine had a studio in downtown L.A. in what we call ‘The Nickel.’ It’s the worst part of Los Angeles — you’re walking by homeless families and people living in boxes. We were feeling like beat-up rock stars, but when you have to step over homeless families it definitely puts your shit in perspective.

“It made us realize how lucky we were. It made us buckle down and want to make something we could stand behind and feel good about.”

Ultimately, Berlin says Los Lobos will probably never shake off La Bamba, but why would they want to?

“If we see kids and families out there, we definitely play it. It’s certainly no albatross, believe me. The only possible pejorative thing about it was that people misunderstood what we were about for a little while. But we don’t mind playing it. We’re there to make people happy. We want people to enjoy the experience.”

Los Lobos open for Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Calgary Nov. 13, Saskatoon Nov. 14 and Toronto Nov. 19.